STRUGGLE SESSION: Deep Fakes, Dumb Fucks, Dirty Faps and More!

...g on where he is. That’s up there with — if not beyond — revenge porn. Just because the unethical AI industry dumped their deep fake technology on us doesn’t mean we should shrug our shoulders and start making spank bank material. Even if he doesn’t intend to share it, that stuff has a way of getting loose. It’s only a matter of time before an innocent person loses their job or their kids because some deep fake porn got out, intentionally or accidentally. It’s getting to a point where it isn’t easily identified. Dan you are letting caller’s husband off way too easy. I responded with “ugh” to telegraph my disgust and disapproval — it’s not okay, it falls outside the zone of erotic autonomy, he should knock it off — and I slapped that “ugh” on him for one of the reasons PleasantvilleMafia cites in his comment: stuff has a way of getting loose. And someone who hasn’t been able to hide this shit from his partner probably isn’t gonna keep this shit from leaking and/or isn’t really interested in keeping this shit from leaking — if he’s “accidentally” letting his girlfriend see these deep fake porn clips starring her friends (!!!), he’s probably sharing them with other people on purpose. And that — all of that (making them, showing them to his GF, posting them online — is not okay and he shouldn’t be doing it. But I don’t know how we stop people from doing shit like this and/or abusing this technology in this particular way. (Maybe getting dumped by his GF will bring him to his senses.) Revenge porn has been criminalized over the last fifteen years, but the crime is committed when private images are shared without the consent of the people in them, not when they’re created or possessed. Likewise, it’s the distribution — accidental or intentional— of “nonconsensual deep fake porn” that has been criminalized by the Take It Down Act, which was co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R) and signed into law in May. This new law doesn’t prevent people from making or possessing these kinds of videos, it merely establishes penalties if they’re shared or posted somewhere without the consent of the people who appear (or appear to appear) in them. Just as high-profile prosecutions of people who made nude pics or videos of their exes public to ruin their lives led to a drop in people doing that shit, here’s hoping some high-profile prosecutions of people like RTPO’s boyfriend will have the same impact. Says WhatWoulds… I would really love to understand why and how you think it’s okay and perfectly ethical for a man to make AI porn of people without their consent? I don’t think it’s okay — and I certainly didn’t describe it as “ethical,” FFS. People generally seem to read my response before jumping into the comment threads at Savage.Love, but the same rules don’t seem to apply on Instagram. Lots of chatter in the comments about the question — deep breath — from the woman whose friend confided in her that her boyfriend wouldn’t propose to her unless she agreed to have a threesome at some point after the wedding, and the woman (again: friend of the LW) agreed and now this friend is engaged to her boyfriend but — as she told the friend who sent me a letter — she didn’t mean it and has no intention of ever having that threesome. Says BiDanFan… MFM: Your friend is, obviously, an asshole. I think she should give her fiancé a hall pass to have a one-off threesome without her. Which of course she won’t do. Is anyone’s ultimate fantasy really a one-off thing? I mean, some fantasies — if realized — are gonna be one-off deals; castration fantasies, for example, or full-meal-deal vore fantasies, if realized, are going to be one-offs. (Or two-offs in the case of castration.) But people who are into vanilla sex — people whose ultimate fantasy is missionary position intercourse in the context of a loving and sexually-exclusive relationship — want to experience vanilla sex more than once in their lives. Same goes for people with kinks and/or crazy fantasies: someone into bondage will want to get tied up more than once in his life, someone into group sex is going to want to have group sex more than once in her life, someone into pegging is going to want to have his ass pegged or peg someone’s ass more than once in their life. No one ever tells a vanilla person they can do that vanilla shit once “to get it out of [their] systems,” but people seem to think that’ll work for kinky people… and it doesn’t. Ask me how I know. Says Anonymous via email… Dan, I heard on your last episode about how ChatGPT is now able to write erotica. I have ChatGPT — and the paid version — and I was wondering if you were talking about THE ChatGPT? Because I tried to get it to write a dirty story and it told me this: “Even if a story is legal and consensual, I still have some hard guardrails around sexually explicit content, especially when it involves erotic depictions of real people or anything that crosses into graphic sexual detail. I can write romance, flirtation, suggestive scenes, and sensual storytelling — but it has to stay within those boundaries and not tip into explicit sexual descriptions.” Can you share which platform you used to write your stories? I cannot get mine to go deep down and dirty! I used ChatGPT to write a few stories — briefly, as an experiment, and just to confirm what I was hearing from friends. As I said in the intro, ChatGPT seems to have been programmed to play hard to get. You give it a dirty prompt and ChatGPT responds by saying, “Heavens! That’s filthy! I couldn’t possibly!” And then you say, “Write what you can ‘within your boundaries’ based on my prompt,” and et voilà: ChatGPT pumps out utter filth. (Or that’s what my three friends, each one of whom says they’re using ChatGPT, have told me. Ahem.) I don’t think this is great — current AI chatbots are essentially training users not to take “no” for an answer (not great!) — and here’s hoping someone convinces Sam Altman to delete “be coy at first” from ChatGPT’s bag of emotionally manipulative tricks before they role out the next upgrade. Says ExWuschel on BlueSky… Since it came up in the most recent struggle session by @dansavage.bsky.social, I tried ChatGPT for erotic storytelling — and hoo boy, at least in the EU it came up with hardcore BDSM in the first prompt and, after asking for explicit consent, very explicit descriptions of kinky sex in the second. Says WriteMe via email… Recently you talked about using ChatGPT for some erotic and dirty story telling, and I just wanted to let you know about chatroger.com. It’s free (at least for now), they have multiple characters, personalities, body types, etc, and you can “interact” with them in what can be a very filthy adventure. Says Anonymous via email on the same subject… A reply to last week’s opening about AI and erotica: I was disappointed to hear that Dan discussing but not condemning AI use. As a queer artist and writer, these systems are built on the backs of hard working artists and I’m troubled that Dan would say that he loves erotica and wouldn’t advocate for those creators. Putting to the side that it’s destroying our planet and destroying our drinking water, as someone who has an independent artistic endeavor like a podcast as his livelihood, I feel there should be more nuance in discussion and approach. I prefer erotica written by actual human beings, as I strongly implied (but may have failed to unambiguously state) in that intro. There’s really nothing better than feeling like someone out there — even someone you’ll never meet — gets you, understands you, and shares your kinks/interests/turn-ons. It may take longer to find one of those stories, but finding one makes you feel less alone in this world. Erotica written by a bot responding to your prompts is isolating and makes you — or certainly made me — feel more alone, not less. And going along for the ride, i.e. reading erotica that was written by another human being that isn’t tailored to your interests, can be transformative: you could discover new interests, turn-ons, and kinks. It also gives you a glimpse into another person’s soul, something AI can’t do. And while I acknowledged the harms this technology is doing to our planet, our psyches, and our careers (including the careers of authors of erotica) in that intro, I didn’t get into the ethics of giant tech companies “training” AI models by shoveling copyrighted material — the intellectual property of actual human creators — into their high-tech wood chippers without the permission of the people who created these works. (The NYT has sued, Sarah Silverman has sued.) So, here’s hoping my friends who were suddenly turned on to erotica — even if it was written for them by AI — will get bored with the stories AI writes for them and start seeking out erotica written by actual human beings, queer and otherwise, who do more than just barf out stories based on prompts. I gave ChatGPT smut a try and enjoyed the first couple of stories… but it’s been two weeks since I opened ChatGPT and I’m back to enjoying smut written by human beings. Says DexterZ about this week’s intro… For those looking for a mix of porn and erotica, I recently discovered this British guy on Bluesky who reads erotica while stroking his beautiful fat uncut cock. He’d make a great guest — I might even sign up for Magnum if you have him on the show! The invite is out! Says Cruella de Phil… Not to overreact here, Dan, but the open hostility you allowed your guest to express toward all straight people with no pushback is just offensive. Some of us have been supporting queer rights — not to mention your work — for about as long as we can remember. Hearing that we need to be “gate-kept” and treated with hostility just for being in a public place, sitting there, minding our own business is fucked up. And I’m not even straight, but I’m “straight passing” enough that your asshole guest would probably still try to chase me away. Neither Leo Herrera nor I hate straight people — I’ve dedicated a good chunk of my life to helping straight people — and we certainly don’t hate “straight-passing” queer people. (Some of our best friends….) Hell, straight-passing queer people constitute the majority of the queer community and neither Leo nor I hate the majority of our fellow queers. (Lesbian Republicans? Gay men who put “no fats, no femmes” in their Grindr profiles? Bisexuals who complain about how awful it is to be closeted without ever exiting the closet? No patience for them — but even then, no hate.) I asked Leo to clarify — does he hate straight people? — and he replied via email: “My comments were aimed at heterosexuals and heterosexual families in sex-positive and nudist Queer spaces,” Leo wrote. “Straight women, children, and the predators they may attract have caused many of our spaces  to be endangered and shut down. As I write in (Analog) Cruising, ‘heterosexuality requires its own terrain.'” A one-time reader, first-time writer waited a long time to send this very sweary email… I have been wanting to say something to you for over twenty years. I have only read your fucking column once. A man wrote to you saying he preferred masturbating over having sex with his girlfriend. There are all kinds of positive things you could have said. You could have suggested he talk to a therapist about whether he has a problem feeling sexual with someone he’s emotionally intimate with. You could have said that masturbation can be a healthy part of a relationship. You could have said all kinds of things. But what did you do? You fucking savaged him. You judged him. You called him selfish. Jesus fucking Christ, what is wrong with you? You have no business giving sex advice to anyone. You were a total fucking asshole to this poor guy. I hope he never saw your idiotic answer. If he did, I hope he got competent help from a real expert and got over what you did to him. I’m glad you got that off your chest — and I’m sorry you’ve had to carry that around for twenty years — but I would encourage you to maybe read one or two of the other 3000+ columns I’ve written over the last 34 years before coming to a final judgment about my body of work. (But, hey, they’re not all gems.) With that out of the way: I think “fucking” in “Jesus Fucking Christ” should get a capital “F” because the implication/joke is that “Fucking” is Jesus Christ’s middle name. “Jesus fucking Christ” suggests that this Jesus person is fucking this Christ person… and that’s impossible because Jesus and Christ are the same person. So, unless you’re telling Jesus to go fuck himself — which you weren’t (you’re not mad at Jesus, you’re mad at me) — you should capitalize that “F,” if only to avoid confusion. A follow-up email from the sweary one-time reader, first-time writer… I’m sorry I just swore at you so much. This summer is the first time in my life I’ve started swearing. As soon as I sent that message, a fly with a white lump of cobweb on it suddenly flew at me, buzzing like some kind of Fury. It was scary, and seemed like a sign I shouldn’t have been so harsh. Please don’t worry about it. Savage Love has always been a safe space for F-bombs. I dish ’em out, Sweary, and I can take ’em. And a lot of us are cracking under the pressure right now, so I totally understand how you’re feeling. No fucking need to apologize. Says Bertin about my most recent Quickies column… Possibly my first literal ‘lol’ in weeks. Thanks. You’re welcome, Bertin! Says Tracy via email… Scrolling on Reddit and saw a board game called “Oh Peg It.” Copyright 1969! Lots of allusions to “pegging,” even on the box. They probably didn’t mean it the same way you or I would… or did they? Not gonna send you a link so I don’t set off your safety filters, but it’s easily googled. Okay, here’s a letter that came in this week that’s not going to make it into the column… I’m engaged to the love of my life. We’ve been together for twelve years, and we’re thrilled to move forward with our relationship in ways only marriage can allow. We met when we were young and gay marriage wasn’t even legal in most of the USA, so for much of our relationship we didn’t even think that it mattered. But as you age, things change, and I asked her to marry me. Now, though, our sex life as dwindled to almost nothing. Sex has always been important to me, but she now says it doesn’t matter to her much anymore. We’ve argued multiple times because I ask that we have sex more and she says it’s completely unrealistic given our work schedules and life priorities. It’s to the point where she suggested I get a “side girl” to fulfill my sexual needs because she just can’t do it. Ethical non-monogamy has really taken off recently, and I have considered it, but I just can’t shake this feeling that it will ruin our relationship. I’ve never considered myself poly, and the idea seems daunting and like a lot of extra work, to be honest. Is this a case of lesbian bed death? Cold feet before marriage? Or am I expecting too much from her? Looming Big Day Got some advice for LBD? Drop it in the comments…